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Who will take over your digital life when you die? You decide

It’s a little eerie to think about your Facebook profile remaining active once you have […]

It’s a little eerie to think about your Facebook profile remaining active once you have died, as if you still exist in some digital form.

It usually doesn’t remain untouched, though. Friends and family have been able to turn a profile into memorial page by notifying Facebook.

But as of today, Facebook is providing the option for users to select a “legacy contact,” which will allow a chosen person to partially control the profile.

The legacy contact can approve friend requests, change profile and cover photos and put announcements for things like memorial services at the top of the profile. To avoid confusion, memorialized profiles say “Remembering” above the name.

Users also have the option to have Facebook just delete the profile after death (assuming a loved one notifies them).

Facebook product manager Vanessa Callison-Burch told TechCrunch that the company’s community operations team heard different stories along with the previous requests to memorialize profiles, which led the to the idea of the legacy contact.

The team heard things like a mother wanting to change the profile picture of her late daughter, or a child’s cousin wanting to “friend” her after she died.

When choosing your legacy contact, you can decide if you would like to allow them to download things like your status history and photos. One thing that will remain private are personal messages.

You can select your legacy contact on Facebook by going to Settings->Security->Legacy Contact, and you can write a message to the person of your choice telling them that you’ve written them into your digital will.

Google offers a similar option, should your account become inactive. You can determine a “timeout period” that indicates you are no longer using our account after a certain period of inactivity. Google will send a notification via text message and an optional email before the timeout period is up.

You can also add contacts you trust that would be notified when your account is inactive and provide the option of giving them access to your data. And like Facebook, you can instruct Google to delete your account after the timeout period is up, too.

With 1.35 billion monthly Facebook users, according to Digital Marketing Ramblings, that’s a lot people whose memories and photos are all in one place. These options make a lot of sense for the world we live in today.

[Photo from Flickr user mkhmarketing]

 

 

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